1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to optimizing content delivered to a receiving terminal requesting the content. In particular, the present invention relates to a novel and improved method, server and computer program for creating exact layouts and optimizing the amount of content to different media environments simultaneously.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is a growing need for consumers and companies to be able to publish content in different media environments. However, currently creating and publishing multiple media content is hard or even impossible, for most people and businesses, because no individual can keep up with the pace of technological development and the different tools.
Designers and publishers of electronic content are facing new challenges in mobile editing and publishing. Mobile terminal displays are and will be of different size and quality, mainly because of ergonomic and economic reasons. For example, mobile phone manufacturer's display sizes vary from low-resolution monochromic displays, e.g. 84×48 pixel, to high-resolution high color displays, e.g. 640×320 pixel 16 bit displays.
Ergonomics in mobile phones means that mobile terminal sizes depend on the usage. Small phones should be as small as possible, at least fit into shirt pocket. Media phones need bigger screens but should still be operable with one hand. Personal digital assistants (PDA) can have even bigger displays than mobile phones and be operable with two hands (buy using e.g. a stylus, a full-size keyboard), but the terminals should still fit into a pocket (opposed to laptop).
Economic reasons include that, for example, the display is one of the most expensive components of a mobile terminal. In order for a mobile phone manufacturer to create different price categories and still make reasonable profit, displays of different quality are needed, starting from low quality and low cost to high quality and high cost.
Currently designers and content publishers have two choices when creating content for mobile terminals and web pages: 1) create one “the lowest common denominator” content or 2) optimize manually content for each of the terminals. Using the lowest common denominator results in Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) type pages, where content is on top of each other. Furthermore, images do not work well and scrolling is essential. Optimizing content manually for different terminals is expensive and laborious, because first the content optimizer must collect information about the terminals and then create the content separately for each of the terminals. Besides, the technology is changing constantly, so the layouts of the content need to be updated all the time.
Vector editing programs enable stretching of content to correspond with the size of a display, after the user has downloaded client software. Sometimes there may not even be software available for that particular operating system. The problem is that the user cannot control how many and what size cells the layouts contain in different size displays. Therefore the content is never optimal for the terminal.
In web editors a layout scales according to the size of the content. This enables that all the content can be shown, if the web editor takes into account capabilities of different mobile web browsers. However, this creates long scrollable content or web pages, which are not optimal for small mobile displays. In mobile terminals the width of content is always forced into the width of the display although a user may have originally determined it to be some other width. This makes the creating of mobile web pages difficult using a web editor, since certain layouts simply do not fit into small mobile terminal displays. Many designers go around this problem by creating WAP type page structures, where content is on the top of each other and there is few or none content side by side, even though the mobile web browser would enable more complex page structures.
Prior art solutions disclose solutions for optimizing content delivered to a receiving terminal. Since nowadays, for example, mobile terminals are able to receive various content via the Internet or a mobile communication network, the variety of the receiving terminals has increased immensely. The prior art content optimization solutions, which are available are either fully automatic or the solution is lacking sophistication or flexibility.
US 2002/0097411 (Roche et al.) discloses a solution in which automatically optimizes an image for a receiving terminal based on the receiving terminal display characteristics. The solution determines from the display characteristics corresponding to the data types of the image, those which are the closest to the extracted display characteristics so that the image data associated with the type of the data corresponding to the determined characteristics are transmitted to the receiving terminal. The solution disclosed in the publication focuses on changing colors and resolution automatically as well as sending the image data gradually to a client device. The publication does not offer a solution in which a designer would be able to influence to content delivered to a user (device).
U.S. Pat. No. 6,741,853 (Jiang et al.) discloses a solution for providing information to devices in a format preferable to a device type. This is achieved by receiving an information request, detecting the device type from which the information request originated, adapting the content for presentation on the device type, and presenting the information to the device. The solution disclosed in the publication is based on fully automation. Furthermore, it does not disclose a solution in which a designer would be able to influence to content delivered to a user (device).
US 2004/0117735 (Breen) discloses a solution for adapting one or more web pages having text, images and/or video content to the characteristics and within the capabilities of the presentation context, delivery context and the content itself. A graphical designer prepares an image or video by creating metadata profiles describing the characteristics and limitations for the images or video. In practice the solution disclosed in the publication works optimally only as a client-server solution and in web pages.
Prior art solutions fail to disclose a solution in which a content editor, e.g. a designer, is able to control the amount of automatic optimization of content sent to a receiving terminal.